


synodic, sidereal

by agonies (Hyb)



Series: isolated incidents [5]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Child Soldiers, Gundam Wing AU, M/M, Mecha, Past Character Death, Reunions, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 03:28:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20941535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: "Why do you bother wearing a uniform?" Jihoon asked him once, in a rare admission that he thought of Mingyu at all.





	synodic, sidereal

"Is it your first time to Earth?" the steward asks kindly, mistaking his nerves as he fiddles with the window shade from his seat. "Let me get you some orange juice."

Mingyu remembers himself. His uniform is packed, folded in crisp lines. In jeans and an old sweater, he must look very young. He _ is _ young. Sometimes he forgets.

"I'm alright." He laces his fingers across his lap and beams when the steward looks unconvinced. Seungkwan, his badge reads. Mingyu will be sure to put a good word in. "It's not my first time," he adds, mild and reassuring, because he enjoys the luxury of not being recognized. Because it's an easier answer than _ I'm a pilot. I _ was _ a pilot. You would remember my name, from the war. I might have killed someone you knew. _

_ I was a soldier, _ he doesn't say. _ But now they tell me I was a child. _

If Jihoon was ever a child, it was before Mingyu met him. Before the experiments that made him faster, stronger, with clarity of calculation and no fear of death. Unlike Jihoon, Mingyu wasn't hand reared to be a super soldier, wasn't conditioned in labs with code words and triggers, not on his colony. They asked him if he had any family to miss him, and he said no, and then they brought him to the shooting range with the others.

They were fifteen years old when Mingyu met him and shot him twice by mistake. Fifteen, skinny, both of them undersized like spacer kids so often were. That's how Mingyu remembers him, for so long: bleeding from his thigh, squinting against the harsh sunlight that still dazzled them earthside. Frowning, tense, arrogant.

Jihoon never wanted his help, not even when he was outnumbered and outgunned, didn’t care that they were on the same side.

_ Did you ever stop to think I was a scared kid too, _ Mingyu fumes even now, although he never said it when it might have mattered. Just kept close on Jihoon’s heels like a chattering shadow. But Mingyu thinks, Mingyu knows, you can only trust someone with your life in battle so many times before they make a home under your skin. With Jihoon it was always The Mission, nothing personal, but how many times did he risk the mission to come back for Mingyu? Sometimes, when Mingyu can’t sleep, he stares at the ceiling in his tidy officer’s quarters and he counts them. Shanghai, Qingdao, Volgograd. More, so many more. He remembers Jihoon holding his hand too tight so their blood slick fingers wouldn’t slip away. He remembers the whites of his eyes shining in the dark, and the heat of his breath when everything else was cold.

"Don't think this means I like you," Jihoon would say later, always wooden in the face of Mingyu's teasing. And on a bold day he might say back, "that's funny, because I think you like me more than you'll tolerate anyone else."

"Why do you bother wearing a uniform?" Jihoon asked him once, in a rare admission that he thought of Mingyu at all. 

What Mingyu wore back then was barely a uniform, scavenged pieces from the surplus stores back home, canvas jacket and pants in muddled greens like terrain Mingyu had only ever seen in movies, cuffs rolled to accommodate his skinny wrists and ankles back before his unexpected growth spurt. But it made him feel whole, so he wore it until it stank and washed it in rain barrels and mountain creeks earthside. The ocean, once, because he didn’t know how the salt would stiffen. He wore Jeonghan’s clothes, that day, and the seagulls perched on their vacant mobile suits where they were posed on the shore like monuments to a war that had ended a hundred years before.

He knew what Jihoon meant. That no one should ever see them, anyway. The five of them, called terrorists on Earth and freedom fighters back home, they were all pallid with fatigue, hollow in the cheeks. How could they live up to the suits they occupied, twenty meters tall with armor like elegant nightmares and hard glinting green eyes. Buster rifles and beam sabers and scythes, missile launchers. When they were faceless they were invincible, Jihoon might have said, but that would have been too close to reassurance, so he never did.

Then again, Jihoon never did imagine he would survive the war.

Wonwoo always understood the power of a uniform, Mingyu thinks. That’s why he’s sitting behind his desk now, stripes and bars across his chest, while Jeonghan and Joshua detonated their suits, gave the new minted military brass the finger, and waltzed off to enjoy peacetime in their little house by the sea. It’s a nice view. Nice inside, too, when Joshua’s mouth is soft and smiling with morning and Jeonghan wraps a sheet around his nakedness and gripes about the draft. Not that Mingyu can visit as often as he’d like.

It’s for the best. He might get too comfortable, and they aren’t his to keep.

There were five of them, five mobile suits all forged with gundanium from the hearts of asteroids. Stronger, faster, lighter. In the veterans support group Mingyu was sent to at seventeen, they couldn’t understand. We were _ better, _he couldn’t say. You can’t imagine how it felt. No one could touch us. I miss the war every day.

Wonwoo sends his assistant away, and when the door closes Mingyu sweeps off his hat and unbuttons his collar. 

“So this isn’t official business,” he drawls. “You want to come out and lose at darts again? I’ve got time.”

“You always have time,” Wonwoo rolls his eyes. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Something softens his mouth but tightens his eyes all at once, and Mingyu doesn’t like that combination one bit. “Jeonghan tells me you’re still looking for Jihoon.”

His mouth goes arid. “I can do what I like when I’m not on duty. I haven’t abused any resources.”

“Bullshit,” Wonwoo says, without heat. “You may not have broken any laws, but I’m sure you’ve tried everything else.”

“Is this a formal warning?”

“What? Why— would you sit down? Of course not, I’m saying this as your friend.”

“You’re my superior officer first,” he says, and Wonwoo doesn’t flinch at the barb. He’s stronger than that. _ My friend Minghao, who I killed, _Wonwoo will say of their greatest enemy after a few glasses of wine. It was the death Xu Minghao wanted, he told Jeonghan once, still arguing for a dead man’s honor, nevermind that the same man also started the war.

_ I was his second choice, _ he mumbled wetly into Mingyu’s neck, when they were eighteen and so drunk they couldn’t see, stumbling under artificial moonlight. _ Jihoon wouldn’t duel him, I never got to ask him why. Jihoon was never scared of anything, was he? _

“I shouldn’t ask this of you.” Wonwoo adjusts his glasses. “But even if I’m wrong, I think you’ll forgive me. Can you be on a shuttle tomorrow?”

“I’m not scheduled to visit L3 until the end of the month,” he blinks, thrown by the non-sequitur. There’s nothing urgent on the neighboring colony to accelerate their timeline.

“Not there.” Wonwoo smiles wanly. “To Earth. I need you to go back to Earth. An old friend contacted me, and she was right to be discreet. If Jihoon is really there—” he presses over Mingyu’s knifing inhale, “he’s under no kind of protection. Besides. He’ll listen to you.”

“He never listened to me,” Mingyu says, and the world bucks and sways as if the artificial gravity has given way beneath his feet.

On the train, still without his uniform, he thinks about safehouses and the way Earth was always louder than space, how even the silence breathed. How watching Jihoon in twilight, naked of his suit, it seemed like he was burning a hole in the air. He thinks about the first time they felt rain, together, and they were shocked into stillness, their faces turned up until blood and sweat ran into their eyes.

"No one told me it was beautiful," Jihoon whispered once in a dark hangar, and Mingyu plays that moment back a thousand times after the war ends, after Jihoon disappears.

He wants to say, I was so young I'd never kissed anyone before, but I wanted it to be you. He wants to say, I've kissed a lot of people now, and I still want it to be you. He wonders what kind of man Jihoon is now. If he still loves to fly, and hates hurting people.

Mingyu grew up on a space colony where the horizon curved upward and there was no lightning or thunder. He grew up with patriotism and a stolen name and a mission, and on the colony he's a hero where Earth calls him a relic at best and a terrorist at worst.

But Earth is where he remembers Jihoon best. Not his mobile suit and its cold flat eyes in space, or the silent blinding discharge of his laser cannon. On Earth it was just Jihoon, always bruised and scarred and tired. Always, he’s known Jihoon would be on Earth like he knows nothing else, not even gravity, and it still takes all these years and dumb luck to find him.

In the end he's by the sea, repairing boats, looking like a stranger.

"Are you here to recruit me or arrest me?" Jihoon asks, so handsome with the sun in his eyes that Mingyu is fifteen again, and he's never been in love before, but just once he wants this awful boy to lie to him and say they won't die tomorrow.

"Why, are you someone important?" Mingyu asks, interested. "I don't think we've met."

And once Jihoon would have rolled his eyes at most, but he's so different now, Mingyu's map of his tells is useless. He climbs the dock and stands up close to Mingyu and studies the insignia on his new uniform. "I guess you remind me of someone," he says, and Mingyu has never heard him drawl like that. Sharing a joke. He sounds warm. "He shot me, the day we met. Twice. I still have the scars. I can feel them when it rains."

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I found you?” 

Jihoon shoves a bite of fish in his mouth and shrugs, squinting at the fading sunset. The dock is quiet. Everyone’s left. Mingyu regrets changing back into his uniform when Jihoon looks so at home in his bare ankles and shoulders. He’s so broad now, more than Mingyu ever imagined he might be.

“I always sort of figured it would be you, if anybody. Maybe Joshua,” he amends. “He always just, knew things.”

“He still does. What are you doing here?”

He isn’t sure why he asks. Jihoon was always going to come back to Earth. But Jihoon answers him anyway, and it’s like he reaches inside Mingyu and pulls the words out one by one from some dark place he thought no light could reach. How he was only ever good at one thing, the best, and then it was over. How many times their orders were wrong, how many times counterintelligence got the better of them, and in their faster, better, lighter suits they annihilated their allies instead of their enemies. 

“Jeonghan told me you gave the Vice Chancellor’s daughter a gun and told her to shoot you.”

“I gave her the option,” Jihoon winces. “I killed her father. Saying it was a mistake won’t bring him back. I wouldn’t do it now,” he murmurs, voice dwindling to something thoughtful and small. “But it seemed fair at the time.”

“So you aren’t waiting here for someone to come and get their revenge,” Mingyu says tightly.

“Let me show you something,” Jihoon says, and he rolls himself beneath an overturned boat on risers. Small, meant for two or three occupants. Mingyu hesitates, checks that the straps over his gun holster are snug, and shuffles down to join him. 

It’s dark, inky compared to the dusk outside, and even on risers the boat is very close to their faces. 

Mingyu stares, and then he understands. “It’s like the cockpit. You do this much?”

“More than I’ll admit,” Jihoon says, again with that new and baffling warmth. “Thought you’d like it.”

“When have you ever cared what I’d _ like? _” Mingyu laughs, or tries to, but the words come out squeezed and strange. 

Ten years ago, Jihoon would have ignored him. Now he shifts so his chin is digging into Mingyu’s shoulder. The hush of the waves suddenly seems very far away.

“I think about you all the time, you know. I wasn’t a very good friend to you.”

“Is this a thing you do now?” Mingyu struggles for air. “Use your words?”

“Sometimes,” Jihoon says, and Mingyu can’t see his face but he can hear the smile in the his voice. “Mingyu, tell me why you’re here.”

“You shouldn’t be on Earth without some kind of security. Even Joshua and Jeonghan agreed to that. There are still people here who would treat you like a war criminal.”

“I’m not the criminal, I’m the crime. We all are. That’s not why it had to be you, is it?” He eases up, careful of the low overhead, and braces a hand across Mingyu’s body, beside his ribs. His tousled hair falls over his eyes. Back when Mingyu knew him, he used to keep it shaved close to his scalp. He did it himself, he must have. He’d miss little spots, sometimes, behind his ears or at the base of his skull, and Mingyu would stare and stare at the fragile proof that he was human.

“I always looked for you,” Mingyu rasps, and shuts his eyes when Jihoon kisses his chin. “You didn’t say goodbye, fuck you.”

“The first time I ever kissed someone,” Jihoon says against his cheek before he gives Mingyu his weight, “I understood how it felt when I used to watch you. It used to make me so angry. Not understanding what that was. Can I touch you?”

He needs air, and he needs moonlight, and he needs the blazing spill of the stars that look so different from down here. Only the waves can hear when they kiss, when Jihoon unfastens the holster from his side and shoves it out of sight. When they rock together, hasty and at clumsy angles, he thinks he comes on the scars in Jihoon’s thigh. Where Mingyu shot him, where he left his mark, and the realization blazes heat up his spine.

“Ask me to stay,” he demands, unfairly, with the taste of Jihoon’s skin still on his tongue.

“Not here,” Jihoon shakes his head, still flushed, still stroking Mingyu’s cheek with his thumb. “Let’s go somewhere new.”

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)   
[curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] synodic, siderial](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24436852) by [akikotree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akikotree/pseuds/akikotree)


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